Los Cerritos Wetlands Need Our Help — NOW

It is very important to let the City of Long Beach know you still want Los Cerritos Wetlands restored. There is a political movement against dirty oil operating under guise of “protecting” Los Cerritos Wetlands, launching a misinformation campaign and attempting to flood the city with letters to stop the proposed BOMP Wetlands Restoration/Oil Consolidation project in the fight to ban oil completely. And apparently attempting to get the City of Long Beach to believe the citizens of Long Beach and wetlands supporters no longer want a restoration.

By January 16th please send an email to [email protected] and cc Councilwoman Suzie Price at [email protected] stating your support of restoring Los Cerritos Wetlands and support of the proposed project to do so.

Many years have been spent by wetlands advocates convincing the city to support restoration, we finally have them convinced and now this. Several years were spent on the Conceptual Restoration Plan for LCW, six public workshops were held and numerous members of the public attending and/or provided input, the plan always included moving oil operations in order to restore the land and throughout that process nobody ever brought up any issues with oil or oil operation relocations. The oil industry damaged the wetlands, now it is willing to fix so why not let them?

Current oil operations exist right up to the edge of Steamshovel Slough, our only original part of Los Cerritos Wetlands left. If existing oil operations fail it would devastate our most pristine marsh.

The BOMP Wetlands Restoration/Oil Operations Consolidation removes the pipelines crossing the fault 12 times, plus the active holding tanks and old wells parallel to Steamshovel Slough, all within the first few years of the project, protecting the slough should failure of these old oil facilities occur.

The reconfiguration and consolidation of oil facilities proposed reduces oil pipelines crossing the earthquake fault from 12 down to just one!

The one proposed pipeline crossing the fault is a new pipeline engineered to withstand a 7.x earthquake, with state of the art leak detection and auto shutoff plus containment capabilities 3 times the amount of capacity of the pipeline.

There is no fracking in the proposed wetlands restoration and oil relocation/consolidation project–Geology 101, oil is extracted, water is returned to the ground to maintain pressure balance to prevent ground subsidence to prevent earthquake triggers.

Stopping the proposed project does not “protect” the wetlands. Oil extraction using grandfathered old unsafe methods is already there and poses a threat to our wetlands. Our wetlands are in the “Seal Beach Oil Field”, a reservoir which is not depleted and therefore waiting with hopes in 40 to 100 years oil will just “dry up” and leaving the active unsafe operations in their current location next to Steamshovel Slough isn’t protecting anything from that dirty oil either.

Critics claim the project includes 120 new oil wells. This is false. The wells “consolidated” to 10 acres off to either side of the fault zone are approximately a 50/50 mix of oil wells and water wells.

Currently there are 39 active wells in the fault zone, with a total of 53 wells as some of them are inactive. There is a possibility the inactive wells could be reactivated. In addition 13 wells exist on the other side of the street and fault line. Compared to the 120 oil and water wells, roughly 50/50 mix, which would be approximately 60 wells not on the fault zone.

There is no law that can ban oil drilling from another location off to the side of the wetlands.

No ESHA has been designated at Los Cerritos Wetlands. Studies have been conducted for possible ESHA, but in order for official ESHA designation to occur, a project permit to the California Coastal Commission must be submitted and then the Coastal Commission investigates and declares ESHA.